Bill Belichick Won't Have Any Problem Adapting to the College Game

The NFL embraced the speed no-huddle offense as never before in 2012, when the Patriots ratcheted the tempo of their game to previously unforeseen levels. Belichick's team changed its playcalling and schematics to force defenses to bend to their will, something that Bill Walsh had predicted years before. In his seminal 1998 book, Finding the Winning Edge, Walsh wrote:

Teams will only huddle when the clock is stopped.

Teams will use single-word offensive audibles.

The timing between the quarterback and the receiver will be more defined.

The quarterback will receive direction from the coach at the line of scrimmage. Because the ball can be put into play at any moment, the defense must commit itself with its front and coverage.

Belichick had already adopted certain aspects of a wide-open offense that his forebearers and contemporaries refused to take on. The 2007 Patriots were the first NFL team of the modern era to run over 50 percent of their plays in the shotgun. They set a league record with 589 regular-season points, breaking the record set by the 1998 Minnesota Vikings, who had Randall Cunningham -- a "converted" running quarterback -- under center. In 2008, three teams -- the Patriots, Chiefs and Cardinals -- went shotgun more than half the time. By 2014, that figure had grown to 26 of the 32 NFL teams, and the Philadelphia Eagles led the league with an NFL record 86 percent of their plays with the quarterback away from center. The 2014 Eagles were coached by former Oregon head man Chip Kelly — it was his second year in the NFL — but Kelly had already had a fairly major effect on the pros, and Belichick was the conduit.

Belichick first reached out to Kelly a few years before, and the then-Oregon head coach visited the Patriots' facility in 2010 to discuss an offense that had taken the Pac-12 by storm with its speed concepts, run-pass equality and ability to force opposing defenses to stay in their base formations. Belichick was intrigued by the idea of forcing NFL defenses, which had become far more multiple over the last couple of decades, in a far more basic cage.

“I was interested to hear how he did it,” Belichick told the Boston Globe in 2012. “I would say he expanded it to a different level and it was very interesting to understand what he was doing. Certainly I’ve learned a lot from talking to Chip about his experiences with it and how he does it and his procedure and all that.”

The Patriots started to adapt their playbook to a new level of simplicity in 2011 under then-offensive coordinator Bill O'Brien. A play that may have been called "0 Flood FAP -- SP 238 MAX Z Cross X V" in 2004 was now called much more quickly. Quarterback Tom Brady might utter one word after a play was over to signify the details of a new play, with his teammates understanding what they do and where they go, and enemy defenses unable to adjust. That's what college teams had done for years.

In 2012, Belichick's team set another record -- this time, in number of offensive plays in the regular season, with 1,191. They also led the league in points with 557, but they did it in a different fashion -- by dialing their percentage of shotgun down to 48.2 percent, 14th in the league. Other teams used no-huddle more often than New England did, but no team used the hurry-up with greater effectiveness -- because the Patriots still put a full array of plays and personnel on the field. It was spread speed with traditional depth, and defenses simply didn't know what to do. No surprise that Kelly's Eagles ramped up their own tempo, registering 1,054 plays in 2013 (Kelly's first season) and 1,127 in 2014.

How did defenses adjust? By running far more nickel and dime defenses (five and six defensive backs on the field) and drafting lighter, quicker linebackers who were more half-field defenders than old-school thumpers. From 2011 through 2014, the number of base NFL defensive plays with five or more defensive backs increased from 40 percent in 2011, to 44 percent in 2012, to 49 percent in 2013, to 60 percent in 2014. The effective elimination of substitution advantage forced desperate teams to re-jigger their personnel strategies -- and eventually, more traditionally-minded coaches would follow suit. 

The Patriots selected quarterback Jacoby Brissett out of North Carolina State in the third round of the 2016 draft, and it's a good thing they did. New England began that season with Tom Brady suspended for the first four games due to his involvement in the Deflategate scandal, and Jimmy Garoppolo was the man in charge while Brady served his time. 

That strategy worked until Garoppolo suffered a shoulder injury against the Miami Dolphins in the second game of the season, which put Brissett in the crucible. Brissett completed six of nine passes against Miami for 92 yards in relief, also rushing four times for 12 yards.

In Week 3, Brissett and the Patriots faced the Houston Texans, who had a top defense and were coached by Bill O'Brien, Belichick's former and future offensive coordinator. Everyone expected Belichick to adapt somehow. But nobody expected what the Patriots put on the field against Houston's defense in what became a 27-0 rout in New England's favor. 

Belichick and his staff basically took their offense back to a read-option system in which Brissett — who had 283 rushing attempts for 902 yards and 12 touchdowns at N.C. State and Florida before that — led with his legs. The Texans had absolutely no answer for it. Brissett completed 11 of 19 passes for 103 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 72.9. But on the ground? He was lethal, gaining 48 yards and scoring a touchdown on eight carries.

 "It was crazy," Brissett said of his 27-yard rushing touchdown, in which the Texans gave him a cow pasture to the end zone. "It was awesome. Definitely great to see all the players just run up to you. I got a headache from all the head-bobbing and head-bumping. But it was definitely worth it."

Belichick put that particular set of schemes in mothballs when Brady returned, for obvious reasons. But it's still in his brain, and when it's time to put together an offense for whichever quarterback he has at the college level, let's remember the work he's already done with it at the NFL level.

The only constant in Belichick's defensive strategy has been change, and that change has been defined in part by the Moneyball principle which states that you will derive more value from your roster if you figure out differed ways to utilize undervalued assets -- in Belichick's case, those assets were players who worked better in, say, the 3-4 when fewer teams were running it. Belichick optimized his early Patriots rosters around players who were on the outside looking in, from a schematic sense.

“When we put in the 3-4 in 2000-01, there were three teams running it," Belichick said in late December, 2014. "So, if you wanted a nose tackle, there were plenty of them out there. If you wanted a 3-4 outside linebacker, there were plenty of them out there. Guys like – [Rosevelt] Colvin was a good example at Chicago or even [Mike] Vrabel, those 3-4 outside linebackers, but there’s nowhere to go. New England was a good option for both of them because the guys Mike was playing behind [in Pittsburgh, with a more traditional 3-4 defense]. Rosie was trying to play a 4-3 walked-off-the-line linebacker to a defensive end in sub situations. But it wasn’t really a clean fit for him. So he had a much cleaner fit in the 3-4.”

When the 3-4 craze came back in the 2000s (brought about to a large degree because of New England's success with it), Belichick zigged as everyone else was zagging, and transitioned to a 4-3 look.

“You look back five, six years ago and you’ve got 16, 17, 18 teams playing 3-4," he continued. "You go to the draft board and think, ‘Here’s a nose tackle. Who needs a nose tackle?’ Well, eight teams in front of you need a nose tackle and there’s two nose tackles. It’s something you have to figure out where you can get the players to play in your system. Sometimes you just can’t get them, so either you have to change your system or modify it or play with lesser players if you want to maintain the system. That’s definitely a challenging part of it is keeping up with that, trying to stay at least even with it. Hopefully ahead of it, but at least even, but it’s a lot easier said than done.”

So, when Belichick is competing for transfer portal players, who's to say that he won't have a similar lock on the best players available, and which ones he can appeal to in that schematic sense? 

Belichick's primary gambit to stay ahead of the game back then was to redefine the gap principles of the defensive line Before he started tinkering with his fronts, defensive linemen were generally one-gappers or two-gappers -- they either held the point so other defenders could flow through (two-gappers), or they attacked right off the snap, intending to create chaos (one-gappers). Teams would generally define their lines around one or the other, but Belichick decided that the best way to optimize his talent was to mix the two in hybrid form. This had been done to a degree in other ways -- Pete Carroll always preferred a 4-3 over/under defense with a hybrid linebacker, and Wade Phillips liked to use a 3-4 base look in which his players are actually one-gapping in a traditional two-gap format -- but Belichick took it to another level by redefining the idea of the "one-or-the-other" player.

In Belichick's hybrid fronts, an "over" concept might task the nose tackle and strong-side ends to two-gap, leading to potential blitz possibilities to that side. On the weak side, the three-technique tackle and rush end might be one-gapping and attacking, leaving the front with the best of all possible worlds. Belichick could define his fronts by the mismatches they would potentially create, because he wasn't stuck with one philosophy or the other.

In an "under" hybrid concept, the numbers favor the weak side, and the players might shift their responsibilities. These weren't the high-flying multi-front defenses brought by Dick LeBeau and Dom Capers in Pittsburgh; more of a stream of simple concepts strung together in ways nobody had seen before.

"We can switch up and give you all kinds of different looks," Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest said in February 2004, just before New England beat the Carolina Panthers, 32-29, in Super Bowl XXXVIII. The following season ended with New England's 24-21 win over the Eagles, giving Belichick's team three Super Bowl wins in four years. "They might think I'm coming (blitzing), but I'm actually dropping back into coverage. Or it might be [linebacker Tedy] Bruschi who's coming, and I'm doing something else. I like it. It makes the games enjoyable."

"You have to be flexible enough to learn when you play on this team," Bruschi said in 2004. "I'd been a defensive lineman all my life, and when I got here, they asked me to drop back and used some terminology I'd never heard before. I had to ask an assistant, `What's that?'"

And "that" was the whole point. If Belichick's players had to come to terms with their terminology, and their place in the defense, imagine how confusing it would be for their opponents?

That's why ever-changing fronts have become de rigeur in both the NCAA and the NFL. Belichick will have no trouble with the "hybridization" of the NCAA in a defensive sense, because he helped to refine it in the NFL.